Another great organizational feature in Bridge is the ability to apply ratingsto your images. You can categorize your images using a 5-star rating system andthen locate and display them based on rating.All right, I'm currently in Bridge and I'm viewing the catalog images in ourexercise files, and what I would like to do is actually filter what's beingdisplayed here in the Content panel and I'm going to do that using keywords.Now, in the keywords movie I actually created a new keyword tag called Enzoyear 1, and I applied that keyword tag to only images that were taken in thefirst year of my son Enzo's life. So if I then go over here in the Filter paneland I click where it says Enzo year 1, all of those images that are tagged withthe Enzo year 1 tag are now displayed in this Content panel.

What I would like to do is actually print out certain of these images. Now,in my household I don't usually choose the images that get printed. A lot of timesit's my wife that goes through the images and chooses the ones that she wouldlike to have printed and a lot of it has to do with the fact that she hasalready talked to someone in the family that wants certain images. So she knowswhich ones that need to be printed. Yet I know how to print them better and soit's my job usually to print them out.So one way to do this would be to go through these images and actually writedown using a pen and paper, the filenames of the ones that you would likeprinted. However, that will take way too much time, way too labor-intensive.

Instead, what you can do is go through these images here in Bridge and apply arating to it so that I know that all of the images that have the 5-star ratingapplied are the ones that we're going to print.So how do we go about doing this? What we can do is go through select theimage, and the quickest and easiest way to do this is to click in the areaunderneath the thumbnail. Notice that we have the series of dots, if you clickon one of the dots, it will apply the rating.So for instance, this image is little blurry, so I would say this is a 1-starrating, probably not going to get printed. All right, so I have clicked on thefirst dot and that applied a 1-star rating and now we can see the star. If wego over here, this one is a little blurry as well, but I think a little better,this one is not too bad, I'm going to actually give that one a 4-star rating.

We can go through the list and do this for every image that we like. Let's saythat's a 5-star image right there, the Christmas image.Now, if we have the images that are similar in content and probably deserve thesame rating, you can select multiple images. I'm going to click on this imagehere, hold down the Shift key and select all the way down through the row andthen click on a rating and it will give it the exact same rating. So let's givethese five stars. All right, so now they all have the exact same rating. Sothat's one way that you can apply the same rating to multiple selected imageshere within the Content panel.

All right, another way that you can do this quickly and easily is usingkeyboard shortcuts. So let's select the next image in the list, clicking on itto select it. If we go under the Label menu, notice over here, we can choosethe command from under this Label menu, here we have one star, two, three allthe way down to five stars if you like or No Rating which is actually at thetop and then also there is a Reject.I could choose one from up here, let's say this is a good image, but it's abouta three star. Okay, we're not sure if we want to print that one or not, sort ofin between. But for the other ones rather than going under the menu each time,what we can do is select it and then use the keyboard shortcuts. Command+1would be 1 star, Command+2 2 stars and so on all the way up to 5.

So let's say this is a Command+3 and then we will go to this one. I love thisimage. That one I want to print, Command+5. Select the next image, that'sanother good one, Command+5. Scroll down a little bit. I'm actually using thewheel on my mouse to do that at time. Click over here, we use Command+5 againfor that one. I would like to print that. That one is maybe a Command+3, notsure about that one. Love these, Command+5. In fact, I just love all of these in here.Let's just go ahead, got to print those. I should have included that one too,that one is good. Print that one, that one is maybe and so on and so forth. Soyou understand how we do this. Now, after we have applied some ratings to theseimages, the next thing we can do is filter down our list yet again. Enzo year1, add to it, the 13 images that have five stars. Click on that in the Filter panel.

Now, we're just viewing the images that we want to print. What I can do isselect all of these, open them up in Elements and then proceed to print them.So in this movie what we learned was how we can select images and apply ratingsto them in order to indicate something that we would like to use them for.It doesn't necessarily have to be printing; it could be another project that youwould like to use these images in. It could be maybe a web gallery or a PDFslideshow, something like that.It's some sort of indication to you that these are images that you definitelywant to work with. It's a great, quick and easy way to add that indication toeach image and then you could filter down what's being displayed here in theContent panel list, using these ratings over here in the Filter panel.

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Released

9/29/2008

In Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac Essential Training, Ted LoCascio teaches casual photographers how to organize, edit, and share their digital image libraries using this powerful software package from Adobe. He tours the included Adobe Bridge application, used for importing and organizing photographs, and explores every feature of Elements itself. He demonstrates how to navigate the Elements workspace, which is used to correct and improve images, combine them into projects, and produce slideshows, photo books, web galleries, and more. Ted also explains how to get the most out of each editing mode, and shares tips for correcting, retouching, and sharpening photographs. Example files accompany the course.